It is known that, for avoiding interferences in radio receivers installed on an aircraft, the latter has to be equipped with one or more devices designed to dissipate the electric charges appearing on the surface of the aircraft.
Such electrostatic dischargers rely on the "corona effect" and have generally a body of tapered shape with a free end spaced apart from the aircraft body.
Some of these dischargers are formed with a conductive point or a pair of diametrically opposite points electrically connected to the aircraft body through a resistor of relatively large magnitude of the order of a few tens of megohms.
There has also been proposed the use of a static discharger with a multiplicity of discharge points formed by the ends of filaments insulated from one another.
Finally, known a static discharger has a cylindrical stem of predetermined resistivity, made of a plastic material containing conductive particles, designed to carry off the electric charges at the junction between the front end and the periphery of the stem; this front end may have a conical shape in order to increase the corona effect.
However, none of the known, electrostatic dischargers perform in an entirely satisfactory manner under the complex operating conditions encountered in practice.
As a matter of fact, a static discharger not only should reduce the "noise" generated by all the static discharges in the aircraft radio receivers, a task is provided only imperfectly accomplished in a number of actually constructed or proposed dischargers, but should also have a high discharge efficiency and a low operation threshold in order to simplify the equipment of an aircraft with static dischargers by reducing their number. Moreover, the discharger should operate satisfactorily in the various states where electric charges appear on the aircraft, having regard to flying conditions and to the composition of the atmosphere, and it should also offer a good resistance to wear through erosion in order to avoid the need for frequent replacement.